Drug Discovery Applications

Bringing a successful drug to market is a time consuming and extremely expensive process often requiring more than 10 years of research and testing and hundreds of millions of dollars.

A significant portion of the time and cost associated with this process is drug discovery and high-throughput biological and ADME-TOX (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity) screening. While screening automation techniques have evolved rapidly over the past few years in the areas of instrumentation and consumables, the lack of functional human cell models has forced the continued use of immortalized cell lines, primary cell cultures and animal systems — limiting the evolution and slowing the efficiency of drug discovery processes.

The characteristics of our MLPC have the potential to accelerate drug discovery processes and reduce the overall cost of new drug development — a significant breakthrough for researchers and pharmaceutical companies using cellular materials for high-throughput drug and ADME-TOX screening.

Specifically, the MLPC is a normal, human and clonal stem cell capable of extensive expansion and self-renewal. Our MLPC expands and differentiates outside of the body — in a controllable fashion — into tissues representative of the three germinal layers (e.g., ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm), including neural stem cells, nerve cells, lung cells, precursor liver and pancreas cells, terminally differentiated liver cells, skeletal muscle, fat cells, bone cells and blood vessels. As a result, the MLPC allows for the concurrent, in vitro study of drug effects on a number of genetically identical tissues, which could improve the quality of drug targets, hits and leads — thereby reducing the number of late-stage drug development failures.

Additionally, our MLPC offers greater control and reproducibility during research and translational studies than other cell models. BioE's MLPC lines are single-cell duplicates — not a population of stem cells in which composition can vary from cell to cell. Every replica MLPC is an exact genetic copy of its original, providing cell-to-cell and lot-to-lot reproducibility, which eliminates variables existing in current drug screening paradigms.

The MLPC requires no special culturing conditions for routine maintenance or differentiation, facilitating more efficient high-throughput screening. The ability to retrieve the MLPC from the freezer and controllably differentiate it enables precise, reproducible assays today, tomorrow and five years down the line.